Gift cards account for millions of dollars in gift transactions and millions of dollars in liability for merchants annually. Monetary value is typically associated with these gift cards through stored value accounts that are accessible only through the physical gift cards themselves. Unfortunately, these cards are commonly lost, are forgotten, or otherwise fail to be applied to purchases by their recipients, and the monetary value of these cards thus remains inaccessible to their would-be owners. Furthermore, gift cards are often applicable to only a single brand or merchant, thereby requiring a recipient to carry various gift cards and then sift through the various gift cards in order to complete a transaction.